This biennial exhibition is showing in Athens, Ohio, until September 13th, after which the collection will be divided into 3 groups, which will travel to other art gallery and museum venues in several countries until the end of 2025.

The Dairy Barn has various projects related to the QN23 exhibition.

One is that all exhibiting artists are offered the chance to record a short video on their art and work to submit for editing and posting on the Dairy Barn’s YouTube channel. You can see the video I recorded for QN21, which of course was at the height of the pandemic, and as an older person I didn’t even consider travelling to the opening. For various reasons I didn’t go up to the recent opening of this year’s QN23, either. This past week I’ve been preparing a video about “Abstract Landscape Textures”, and was almost ready to send it to them when I decided to have just one more serious look for any kind of planning diagram I’d drawn, feeling sure I would have done something. In that video I said I’d taken a ‘large page and drawn a few lines on it’, and that was what I’d been looking for. I actually found the diagram, but it turned out to be approximately 7″x5″, a really minimalist doodle taking about 1/3 of a standard A4 page in the blank paged book I do such things in… I’ll post the link to my video on the Dairy Barn’s YouTube channel when it goes live.

It’s a typical of the diagrammatic pics I use to plan my works, but has no annotation this time. I often add lists or numbers that show what I’m needing to think about… but here, the only clue is that the lines extend quite far to the right, indicating that I was intending rows of repeat patterns in the kind of style I diagrammed on the left end – and blank areas indicate I hadn’t actually decided what to put in those parts. I did all the horizontal lines first, then the arcs and beehive shapes – and still not being sure, put it aside for a while and worked on a couple of other projects before taking it up again 4-5 months later.

I think because it took so long to make in fits and starts with other things in between, that by the time it was eventually finished, I felt slightly ambivalent about it, and hadn’t even decided on a name for it beyond the working title ‘large black with gold lines and arcs‘. I had it photographed in the same session with two others, and when it was time to submit for QN, I put details of those other quilts on the form, then, as the entry fee covers three works, I decided I might as well put this one in, too, meaning I had to commit to a title for it! We’ll never know of course whether the jurors would have selected one of the others I entered if there had only two….

On the evening of Thursday 29th of this month, just days from now, I will be giving a virtual slide lecture, “Timetracks: A Guide To Exploring Influences” with Q&A session to follow, as part of The Dairy Barn’s Quilt National workshop program. I’ve finalised the power point slides and sent them a copy, and we’ll have a pre-presentation check next week, to make sure there are no technical problems. Registration is required, and further info is at https://dairybarn.coursestorm.com/course/timetracks-a-guide-to-exploring-influences It will be recorded and available to participants for 6 weeks after that date, which will be helpful to any friends in time zones around the other side of the world who may want to watch it.